This should have been reported ages ago, although yesterday there’s a proclamation lead by slashdot – having Firefox 3.5 as the ‘most popular’ browser starting at the last week of 2009 Worldwide.
The graph deviated below began on July 1, 2008 and ends on December 22, 2009. However, if you will analyze the graph you can see that IE 7.0 dominates the whole July 2008 up to the 3nd week of December which is week 52. Actually if you will thoroughly read the graph and hover the mouse towards the point of IE 7 on the last month, you can see that it incurred 21.9% well in fact Firefox 3.5 only had 21.5% share? (click to enlarge)
The question remains, “Where’s the proof that Firefox is the most popular browser?” – As you can see FF 3.5 only beat IE 8.0 by a thread and IE 7.0 is still 0.4% higher?
*Could it be that this proclamation is aiming for the future fluctuation of IE 7.0, just a prediction that Firefox 3.5 will eat them on 2010? Whatever the case may be its still not safe to assume that Firefox is the most popular well in fact the basis speaks that IE 7.0 was the reigning champ for the whole year (including some months on 2008)
According to Mash, “Nonetheless, the trend lines favor Firefox in the long run: IE’s market share continues its slow decline while Firefox has sustained steady growth.”
However, IE 8 is having a steady growth too, not just enough to oust Firefox 3.5. But hey, it was pretty close, was it? (1.69% difference only)
Keep in mind the legend which stands for other, we assumed chrome, still doesn’t look good on the chart. But we have a strong intuition this will change when 2010 arrives.
So if you’ll ask us if Firefox 3.5 done a pretty good job for 2009? We say hell yes! But it being the world’s most popular browser? Not yet, until we see some more credible and cut-out results. Probably, coming from other sources aside from statcounter.
The Title should be Firefox 3.5 predicted as the most popular browser in the future. But then again that begs the question, for how long? Keep in mind that the release of Firefox 4.0 will be on Oct-Nov, 2010 (estimatedly) Obviously, when that beast is unveiled Firefox 3.5 won’t be able to live with its title anymore.
So what do you think guys, is the title “Firefox 3.5 as the most popular browser” suits it well?
Loading ...
January 19th, 2010 at 8:47 am
I can see that IE7 is the most popular web browser by the 0.4% but since Microsoft is still packaging IE explorer with their WIndows OS then that means that a portion of those statistics are in fact people using their default pre-installed web browser which if you buy WIndows will be Internet Explorer. However Firefox must be downloaded and installed manually which means that 100% of the users are choosing it by going through the steps of downloading and using a different browser. I am sure that is why Firefox was declared the most popular browser because if you don't know that there are any other choices how can you cast a vote. In essence this data is useless to draw any conclusions about "popularity" of a browser but rather just stated what % of people are using what browser. When all OS start with the option as to which browser to download on first start would at least give better results but until then Internet Explorers numbers are padded by Microsoft.